Paramount’s Star Trek TV factory has been going kind of nuts lately. After several years where the franchise’s television fortunes seemed to be trundling along at impulse (this is a Star Trek joke), allowing J.J. Abrams’ nu-Trek movies to carry the torch, the success of CBS All Access’ Star Trek: Discovery appears to have reinvigorated the series, kicking it back into Warp A High Number That’s Probably Pretty Good. (Warp 7? Warp 8? Surely not Warp 9, right?)
Over the last year or two, Paramount and CBS have announced something like four new Star Trek TV projects, including the Short Treks short film anthology, the Patrick Stewart-fronted Picard show, an animated comedy series from Rick & Morty’s Mike McMahan, and an as-yet untitled spy series centered on Michelle Yeoh. Now we can add a fifth project to that grab-bag of space-utopian content, with Deadline reporting today that Nickelodeon has started work on a kids-focused animated Trek series of its very own.
Details about the show’s plot are being kept tighter than a Tribble’s butthole (this is also a Star Trek joke), but it’s being masterminded by Alex Kurtzman, whose various credits in big-budget Hollywood franchises will never stop him from being “The Mummy director Alex Kurtzman” in our hearts. It’s being written, meanwhile, by Kevin and Dan Hageman, whose past accomplishments include The Lego Movie and Hotel Transylvania. If it goes to series, the show would be the first Star Trek TV project explicitly aimed at kids, and the first of this new glut of shows to air on cable, rather than the looming, content-packed Death Star of CBS All Access. (That was not a Star Trek joke.)